Scraps of colored paper, a Greek stamp, a Portuguese sticker, and a background of magazine cuttings accompany Henry Sibley’s Keyed Bugle in e-Flat (1840).
This keyed bugle by the Boston maker Henry Sibley is associated with Edward Kendall, the most celebrated US performer of the instrument. Kendall played with a number of bands including the celebrated Boston Brass Band and toured throughout the country. He is remembered for his encounter with the band leader Patrick Gilmore, with whom he entered into a musical duel. The contest pitted Kendall, performing on keyed bugle, against Gilmore on cornet. While the keyed bugle was prized for its warm sound and subtle tonal inflections, the more technically agile cornet eventually became the undisputed leader of the band. [cite]
The above is the only collage using torn paper this time around.
Joshua Johnson’s Emma Van Name (ca. 1805) eats a strawberry, accompanied by pieces of a Janet Fish artwork.
Son of a white man and an unidentified enslaved mother, Johnson apprenticed to a blacksmith before achieving his freedom in 1782, becoming part of Baltimore’s large free black population. “Emma Van Name” is arguably his most ambitious and engaging portrait of an individual child. [cite]
A water-damaged paperback of Eastman House photography yielded Nicholas Muray’s Woman in a Cell Playing Solitaire (ca. 1950) and Alfred Steiglitz’s Paula, Berlin (1889). Paper scraps, magazine cut-outs, and stickers from clementines make up the rest.
Max Beckmann’s The Old Actress (1926) and Lewis Hine’s Spinner Girl (1908) anchor this collage, with pieces from a Cardiff Castle postcard and scraps from magazines filling in here and there.
Listening List
Germaine Tailleferre’s Arabesque (1973)
Tailleferre dedicated Arabesque to Désiré Dondeyne, the wind band conductor and composer who inspired Tailleferre to write for wind instruments. Dondeyne was a clarinetist who earned first prize in clarinet from the Paris Conservatoire, and later served as solo clarinet of the French Air Force Band. Tailleferre and Dondeyne first met in 1970 while he was working on a concert to honor Les Six, and later became good friends. [cite]
Credits: The sources for the quotations are cited in the text. The photographs (and underlying collages) are mine.
